Peter Stefanidis is gearing up for the release of his third film, The Grave, a study of death, loss and mourning. While the final touches are being made, he is preparing to send it out into the world where he hopes it will succeed like his previous effort, Pontos which was shown at Short Corner as part of the Cannes Film Festival in 2008.

The idea for The Grave came from one of Dean Kalimniou’s Diatribe articles in Neos Kosmos. This particular piece, The Necrotafeio, was published in late 2010, and it got Stefanidis thinking.

“He spoke about his experience at a graveyard,” he explains. “Losing his grandfather and what his grandmother taught him and a lot of the old Greek customs relating to death and funerals and so forth. He gave a very vivid depiction of what he felt like when he was eight or nine years old and his grandfather passed away.”

The article describes traditional Greek mourning and associated customs, of going to their cemetery once a week to clean the grave. While Stefanidis’ own experiences were quite different to those expressed in the article, it obviously struck a chord. It interested him the way different people deal with death in different ways, even when they are from the same culture. Then when his own grandfather passed away last year, he knew that he had something to say about it.

“What I found was that it wasn’t so much that someone had passed away but that your connection with that person, your relationship with that person is severed forever. It’s the relationship that’s in question rather than life or death; it’s the permanent severance of the relationship that you actually mourn.”

He mused on the idea for some time before he got around to writing the script, but it was time well spent. When he finally sat down to write it, he got through most of it in the first week. Then he spent a few weeks ironing out some of the details and fine tuning it. From there they he got straight to the task at hand, spending five months in pre-production while he assembled his creative team. They shot the film late last year.

“There’s a lot of work that has to be done, all the preparation involved in getting a team together because we haven’t got one just sitting back waiting for us to go ahead. You have to get a group of professionals and volunteers, and try to source funding for it. That took us all the way up until August. Then we shot the film over the first two weekends of September.”

One of the most important aspects of the project was finding the right cemetery to make the film in. Stefanidis and his production team looked high and wide to get one that reflected the mood of the piece, and eventually found one at Diamond Creek, north of Melbourne.

“We tried shooting at some of the major ones and realised it just didn’t look the part. Then we found this little cemetery that looks absolutely gorgeous at Diamond Creek. It’s a very old cemetery, about 120 or 130 years old. We approached the trustees and they were very enthusiastic about it. They said ‘no problem let’s go ahead.'”

At this stage, The Grave has been edited, and they’re just putting the sound design and the music onto it. If everything goes according to plan, it will be released around he end of March. After that, Stefanidis plans to submit it to Australian, Greek and selected international film festivals around the world. His clear vision belies that fact that he is fairly new to film-making.

In fact, it was newsreader George Donikian who first spotted his talent. In 2004, Stefanidis had been asked to give a talk on the Pontian genocide to some school children. He realised that the subject may be somewhat obscure to them and he would have to find a way to capture their attention. He made a video montage using some film editing software, and it was obviously successful.

“George Donikian was in the audience, and afterwards he came up to me and said it was one of the most powerful things he’d seen in his twenty years in television. He said I had a gift or a talent and I should pursue it. That gave me the confidence to enrol in film school.”

After a year at the VCA, he formed his own production company, Mithridates Productions, after his hero Mithridates the Great, the Pontian King who he considers the greatest of the ancient era. Having now assembled a stable team of collaborators, and with a number of productions under his belt, it will be interesting to see what he comes up with next.